25 H-Thok Priest disci info.

Hi everyone,
me and my guild are working on 25 H-Thok and I wanted to ask some questions about improving myself.
We’re trying it 8 healers, 3 of them are priest and I am only of those. I am the only one that was so unlucky to not have set bonus 2pc yet.

1) I got 7.39 unbuffed haste , i can’t reforge it away since I got some filler gear (crafted, wrong loots ...);
2) I got 11917 spirit , I burn my mana pretty fast but I can go from pretty low to ok with mindbender, rapture and horridon htf trinket. Other disc priest in raid (4t16) got around 10k;
3) I have nazgrim heroic trinket in by bags (won by coin), but I am pretty sure it’s pretty bad for my disc, so I am still using Sha of Pride (raid finder) and Horridon ones. Is there a place where a disc priest could use Nazgrim trinket?

eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/pozzo-delleternita/Chlo%C3%A9/advanced

For talents, I am using for this fight power infusion to make SS covering easier (i do SS on pull and in kiting phases), I read that some priests use twist of fate but I am not too sure about it, I didn’t really check if raid members drop under 35% and using that “only” for bats part of the fight seems pointless. If you guys are sure that it can proc from a divine star done after a screech, i might try that.

In the end, I wanted you to check my logs, giving myself some tips and tell me if I can check some talent/glyph combination to perform better. I am pretty sure I could improve a lot if I got my t16 2pc , but i have to live without it for the moment.

As similarly progressed priest I'll help you out a bit with my experienced, mind you I'm in a 10m instead of a 25m but I'll be general.

• Twist Of Fate you mention some priests are trying it, I'm one of those priests and I swear buy it. I think it's OP honestly and I love it. If anyone spikes it helps you, compared to PI requiring you to cast when you want it.
• Be sure you save your Inner Focus for when you need it, remove it from any macros you may have it in, it'll prevent you for being kicked twice in a row.
• From my experience, Binding Heal + Glyph is really strong on this fight. It's throughput is really good and it's 1.5s base, so you can cast it between kicks. That may be my 10m bias though.
• Use Mindbender. You can have it on the boss on CD, no reason not to.
• I have Nazgrim normal trinket. I don't think it's that good honestly, and I havn't really found anywhere where it's done noteable healing.
• Your PoM useage is a little less than it should be. Be sure to use it on CD.
• I don't know how your raid is dispelling, but if you're doing single dispels, shield the targets with the poison debuff. If you're mass dispelling obviously don't worry about it.
• Try throwing a SW:P, or Holy Fire up on one of the bats / yeti if you're using ToF. They'll tick and refresh your buff. Divine Star also works.

Regarding mana, if i use MB and Horridon, i'm not sure if to drop some spirit, lowering it i could gain a little crit but i dunno if it's Worth it. Now, i'm pushing up mastery to level it as crit, Mastery from items and crit wih gem and reforges.

My guild has me play disc on this encounter, as Shadow is really useless. The most important thing on this encounter for a Priest of any spec is to position yourself so your Divine Star hits both ranged and melee group. Precast a DS on both groups 1s before the pull, get 5 EE stacks, pop AA and SS, do 2 PoH's before his first scream, then pop Inner Focus and keep spamming PoH until the next one occurs. From there on just keep using DS, PoM and Holy Fire on Cooldown, and try getting 1 Penance tick as often as possible, to maintain EE stacks. Outside of that just spam PW:S. Tell your Paladins to start chaining Devo's on 14 stacks, 'cause that's when your SS will come back off CD. Push your mana in the first p1 as much as possible, then just Mana Hymn after the boss fixates the 1st guy, so you get another Mana Hymn later into the fight. Use the minor Glyph of Sha, because it removes your Mindbender from GCD, same like Empress mace used to do.

Here's a kill log if it may help. I'm healing in full shadow gear, but there's another discipline priest who's gear may be more similar to yours, so check him out rather than me I guess.

When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears
And I held your hand through all of these years

Archangel: I have some difficulties to get to 5 evangelism stacks due to interrupts, actually I can just divine star and shield spam (expecially if meta procs). I have to admit that i could improve with my EE uptime. I need to improve in the 3 aura mastery time frame we have on screech 14.

Good point about HoH, MB already used on cd.

I didn't knew about glyph of sha "bug"... good info.

My question now is , to spam more and better shields in p1, do I need to improve my mastery and/or myspirit? I know that kiting phase it's also for most of the time a mana break phase, but I could get in 2nd p1 with no mana if I am not careful...thoughts?

Precast a DS on both groups 1s before the pull, get 5 EE stacks, pop AA and SS, do 2 PoH's before his first scream, then pop Inner Focus and keep spamming PoH until the next one occurs

If you want to look good on the meters, this would be the best way to go, but usually you should be able to atonement heal with DS on CD the first 3-4 screeches. Healing ground effects should be able to cover in the start, so using SS to maximise your Hps is rather useless.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=9060&e=9668
7 healers, from our second kill yday (Dc'd due to college-internet timer on our first kill, you can look it up if you want, but I was dead for the last 15%).
I don't rely as much on PW:S as others seem to do. You have 4 paladins in your setup, just like me. This is my "usual" way to handle the first part of the fight:
Screech 1-5 - Atonement DPS while using divine star after each screech/on cooldown if timing is correct. Archangel on CD/time with divine star if it only delays a few seconds.
Screech 5, inner focus + PoH for 2 casts.
After this, we start to chain Aura masteries (lasting up untill ~18-20 stacks if memory serves). During this period, I spam PoH while keeping Solace and Penance on cooldown (as I need to use the casts anyway to build Evangelism stacks to keep AA on CD). Spirit shell is used here due to 4 set bonus (and to negate overhealing for a few casts).
When reaching +20 stacks and AM's are running out, I use my second inner focus for another 2 PoH casts, and then shield/solace/divine star untill we stack and push it over.
Mastery is never the way to go for disc. Crit all the way. You can see that my DA healing is about 50% of my total, while comparing to veiled/stormpajks log, they have about 38-40% divine aegis healing.

Comparably, you can see their shield usages are much, much higher than mine - 72 and 52 vs 25. The difference here is that I seem to do alot more atonement healing - added together, I do about 20M healing through atonement, while Stormpajk did 14M and veiled 10M (rough numbers). Basicly, the difference here is that they are focusing more on PW:S during the screech-phases, while I seem to prefer solace/penance/smite as filler still (as it is less mana intensive and allows me to get more throughput stats to boost divine star/POH spam).

Both are viable methods, but my personal opinion is obviously that crit is superior.

A thing that's very important to remember is that what matters here is longevity, not throughput per-say. Using Divine Star when it comes off CD to pre-shield is far, far, far worse than delaying it for 2 seconds and using it after a screech. People need to be completly topped in between screeches, and the "full" healing from divine star is a monster at doing just that. Using it to get aegis shields up is just a waste on this particular fight. This is also the only fight I've chosen to use the healing legendary cloak over the DPS cloak (due partly to the fact that constant atonement spam isn't really viable - alot of PoH and actual healing is going on).

I am the same progression as you in very similar gear (I am 565 equipped). I think you could drop some spirit if possible. Twist of Fate is amazing (I swear by it personally, haven't really used anything else this tier). I checked one attempt that went about 8 minutes and 30 seconds long and I had a 40% uptime on ToF. I agree it does suck you don't have 2set yet, but I found it difficult to get any stacks of Evangelism in during higher acceleration stacks anyways. Inner Focus is also so so important for this fight, so track it and utilize it well. Same with aura mastery. Make sure you know when they are up. When stacks of acceleration get really high, I'm basically shield spamming while rotating in Holy Fire, PoM, and Divine Star for my instants with CDs. I tend to Spirit Shell towards the start of the fight after getting 5 stacks of Evangelism, Smite another 2 times or so before popping Archangel, Spirit Shell, and Inner Focus. I usually get one PoH off during this time, an interrupt gets casted but I have the Inner Focus buff that doesn't interrupt me and I can cover the whole raid with SS (since we lust at the start). The SS stays for the 2nd interrupt as well. I think by the 4th or 5th stack it's nearly impossible to squeeze in a PoH. But I like to start off strong

Both are viable methods, but my personal opinion is obviously that crit is superior.

A thing that's very important to remember is that what matters here is longevity, not throughput per-say..... People need to be completly topped in between screeches, and the "full" healing from divine star is a monster at doing just that.

I afraid the first two statements are not consistent with the last. If you want to help heal up people why on earth would you go for crit? It makes no sense.

Also 40% mastery and 50% crit becomes 40% mastery and 60% crit due to archangel for divine star.

Basically if you have 40% mastery and 50% crit, then because of the diminishing returns from crit and the bonus from the 2set and archangel you are making a huge mistake.

1) You don't get anymore aegis, just spread it on more ppl. Lets face it 0.96% is negligible.

2) You are losing 6.7% healing on everyone. If you want to be anal you can say that it is 6% to account for the slightly increased aegis.

What you are doing in a sense is stripping a little healing from everyone, so that you can shift some of the aegis you would get anyway into 6 additional procs (which you are not guaranteed will go on 6 more people, there is every chance they will go on ppl who already have had some aegis).

Basically if you have 40% mastery and 50% crit, then because of the diminishing returns from crit and the bonus from the 2set and archangel you are making a huge mistake.

1) You don't get anymore aegis, just spread it on more ppl. Lets face it 0.96% is negligible.

2) You are losing 6.7% healing on everyone. If you want to be anal you can say that it is 6% to account for the slightly increased aegis.

What you are doing in a sense is stripping a little healing from everyone, so that you can shift some of the aegis you would get anyway into 6 additional procs (which you are not guaranteed will go on 6 more people, there is every chance they will go on ppl who already have had some aegis).

Overall with 56% AA uptime you end up with 1.5% more aegis but 11% less healing and 6% less PWS.

Why would you go crit all the way, especially with the 2set boosting the value of mastery and devaluing crit?

There is no point in going crit all the way for any encounter. It is just bad.

Real encounters seem to favor the shielding far more than the slightly bigger heals. You are neglecting zero overhealing through aegis, but very likely overhealing through normal healing from mastery.
There's also nothing that makes shielding random targets "bad" on Thok. The only thing healers are doing is spamming their strongest smartheals, with the entire raid standing in ground effects from 8 healers. If you shield 8 of 23 people, then the smart heals will just jump on the people who were not shielded. You lose no potential since all the ground heals now are "6 lowest" rather than "everyone divided".

I have all possible respect for your math, and I agree that in a theoretical instance, you would gain an advantage through higher mastery. But there is simply no encounter that your theoretical assumptions can be put to work - it's just the nature of healing in it's current form. Absorbs reign supreme, and there is no real downside to them. Normal healing just won't become strong enough to beat absorbs when the difference is as small as you are arguing.

In either case, I do find your numbers a bit odd - as soon as you start to get into T16 gear, you'll see your mastery easily rival and occasionally beat out your crit, because there is simply an abundance of mastery on gear (and the fact that it is the second most valueable stat means that we'll be seeking it if we can't get crit, either way).
As an example, I am currently sitting at 40.03% crit (16443 rating) and 45.38% mastery (12219 rating) unbuffed. With the 3K mastery buff, my mastery increase to 53.38%. My crit on the other hand is somewhere in the 46-47% range (I can't really be bothered to find a 5% crit, 5% stat buff at 4:30 in the morning on a dead realm + spend food buff and flask to get the exact number :d).

Thus people would naturally gravitate towards the "higher mastery than crit" at the higher gear levels, purely through the fact that there is nothing else we CAN do, when we don't want spirit or haste as disc.

This is, unbuffed, 42% or so crit and 49% mastery without even trying to balance them or favor mastery - this is simply by picking the pieces that are best for maximizing crit, which is what you will want to do in a "real world" scenario.
Note that the tool does not seem to take the amplifier trinket into account as far as I can see, which means your total mastery would be increased by 9% (or end you at 52.3% mastery before buffs). It does not amplify crit in the same way, only the effects of crit.
(of course, you can gain additional crit rating through professions to change the numbers slightly).

With that said, after looking over your arguments, I think I've figured out why we disagree here -
As far as I can tell, to you, it's "either or" - you can't both maximize crit and get an amount of mastery that will ratio out to keep crit ahead in terms of throughput, because you are spending a lot of your stat-points on spirit. You'll notice that my BiS list has 5k (*1.09 due to amp trinket, so 5.5k or so) spirit, which I personally find more than plenty, as you will recall from previous discussions.
But let us be clear - I am in no way saying that you should be abandoning mastery with my above post. I'm just saying that if you're a disc priest, you are going to be performing worse by gemming and reforging to mastery at the expense of crit, no matter what the math might say. You'll always want main focus on crit, secondary focus on mastery in a real world scenario. If you put spirit above mastery, then that's a whole other can of worms.

Real encounters seem to favor the shielding far more than the slightly bigger heals. You are neglecting zero overhealing through aegis, but very likely overhealing through normal healing from mastery.
There's also nothing that makes shielding random targets "bad" on Thok. The only thing healers are doing is spamming their strongest smartheals, with the entire raid standing in ground effects from 8 healers. If you shield 8 of 23 people, then the smart heals will just jump on the people who were not shielded. You lose no potential since all the ground heals now are "6 lowest" rather than "everyone divided".

As an example, I am currently sitting at 40.03% crit (16443 rating) and 45.38% mastery (12219 rating) unbuffed. With the 3K mastery buff, my mastery increase to 53.38%. My crit on the other hand is somewhere in the 46-47% range (I can't really be bothered to find a 5% crit, 5% stat buff at 4:30 in the morning on a dead realm + spend food buff and flask to get the exact number :d).

Thus people would naturally gravitate towards the "higher mastery than crit" at the higher gear levels, purely through the fact that there is nothing else we CAN do, when we don't want spirit or haste as disc.

Yes but the question is will your heal be enough to push ppl above the threshold now or will someone be left unhealed because of that small amount of healing.

Also 40% crit and 45% mastery is not really crit stacking. It is certainly well above the balance point

But 5.4 pretty much made that obsolete, due to the changes to the level 90 talents, which always have considerable overheal. I would call that pretty balanced mastery/crit.

The thing is that so far above the balance point, mastery boosts AEGIS about as much as crit does. If you overdo it with crit stacking, what will happen is you will end up just sacrificing the + healing from the extra mastery without actually making any gain in aegis.

I run 9k spirit in disc gear. So about 3k less than you do, or 5% crit. unbuffed in my disc gear I have 10778 mastery rating and 8.5k mastery rating. Some of the difference is in gemming, I can potentially ignore socket bonuses completely and get 2400 more crit rating at the cost of oh say 1200 intellect and about 1k spirit, but I would probably be making a loss when it comes to throughput. In any case as you can see there is a shortfall of between 4-5k secondary stats due to gear differences, even accounting for the spirit differences.

But let us be clear - I am in no way saying that you should be abandoning mastery with my above post. I'm just saying that if you're a disc priest, you are going to be performing worse by gemming and reforging to mastery at the expense of crit, no matter what the math might say. You'll always want main focus on crit, secondary focus on mastery in a real world scenario. If you put spirit above mastery, then that's a whole other can of worms.

Only on DPS. On healing there is no difference. You won't notice a difference between mastery and crit in healing so far above the balance point. I am regrettably well below the balance point due to my need to get mastery and the fact that I have to maintain 12k spirit in holy spec.

Note that the tool does not seem to take the amplifier trinket into account as far as I can see, which means your total mastery would be increased by 9% (or end you at 52.3% mastery before buffs). It does not amplify crit in the same way, only the effects of crit.
(of course, you can gain additional crit rating through professions to change the numbers slightly).

That is incorrect. The 8% more crit is functionally equivalent to an 8% increase in crit rate and it applies to your entire crit rate even the portion that comes from the crit buff intellect and the 2-set. Mathematically for throughput it is indistinguishable to a crit rate increase. So that also needs to be factored in for determining where you are.

If you have 42% buffed crit and the 2set, which adds about 6% and the crit buff for another 5% and the amp trinket at 8%, you are looking at 57.24% crit

Using the balance point for aegis generation: crit = (1+mastery)*(1+0.5*mastery)/(2.4+1.6*mastery)

You are going to need 52% buffed mastery at the very least otherwise you are going to be losing not only healing but also aegis. In your BIS set you will have 49+8 = 57% mastery

As you can see at these high levels of crit and mastery the two stats are exactly interchangeable in terms of just aegis. You can switch around quite a bit of mastery for crit with a minute reduction in aegis, but a large change in the + healing bonus.

As I said you have to be quite careful about stacking crit. You can just sacrifice a non trivial amount of + healing for absolutely no benefit other than more DPS at the level of 0.05 to 0.1% of total DPS.

For example if you are at 42% crit and 57% mastery and you choose to go to 47% crit and 49% mastery. On the face of it, it looks like you are trading 4% healing for 2.8% aegis, but in fact its not, because the 2 set adds 5-10% more crit depending on the spell.

With 5% more crit you are trading 4% healing for 1.7% more aegis aegis, with 10% more crit, you are trading 4% healing for 0.7% more aegis. If you add the amp trinket its even more slanted.

But 5.4 pretty much made that obsolete, due to the changes to the level 90 talents, which always have considerable overheal. I would call that pretty balanced mastery/crit.

The thing is that so far above the balance point, mastery boosts AEGIS about as much as crit does. If you overdo it with crit stacking, what will happen is you will end up just sacrificing the + healing from the extra mastery without actually making any gain in aegis.

But I am crit stacking, though. The point was that with the gear aviable to us, we'll end up at the balance point through just gearing up any way - only in *extreme* cases will you be able to overshoot crit compared to mastery if you're decked in SoO normal mode gear (~560 average), and that's WITH crit stacking in sockets and reforges.

I run 9k spirit in disc gear. So about 3k less than you do, or 5% crit. unbuffed in my disc gear I have 10778 mastery rating and 8.5k mastery rating. Some of the difference is in gemming, I can potentially ignore socket bonuses completely and get 2400 more crit rating at the cost of oh say 1200 intellect and about 1k spirit, but I would probably be making a loss when it comes to throughput. In any case as you can see there is a shortfall of between 4-5k secondary stats due to gear differences, even accounting for the spirit differences.

Only socket bonuses I personally avoid is spirit (boots/ring) and haste, personally. But yea, gear is a big part of it, I think. Looked you up and you're still sporting 6 pieces of ToT gear, and just one heroic item. (Also, 200 spirit on chest? Are you sure that's better than the 80 spirit/int ?).

Only on DPS. On healing there is no difference. You won't notice a difference between mastery and crit in healing so far above the balance point. I am regrettably well below the balance point due to my need to get mastery and the fact that I have to maintain 12k spirit in holy spec.

The difference comes in coverage, something you've been arguing alot for as far as I recall. The more crit you have, the more consistently you will cover people with the absorbs. They will be slightly smaller, yes, but they will be "less" random the more crit you have. If the difference is covering 2 more targets with absorbs that are slightly weaker, or adding more absorbtion/natural healing to 6 targets, with almost zero difference in actual output, I'd pick giving 8 people smaller shields in the current state of the game. It's the same reason you like holy's mastery so much - the more you can cover, the better (especially with the uncapped lvl 90 talents, who, as you said, already tend to overheal ALOT. Adding more crit = more shields that are less likely to overheal. Adding more mastery = More healing and bigger shields on something that already overheals).

That is incorrect. The 8% more crit is functionally equivalent to an 8% increase in crit rate and it applies to your entire crit rate even the portion that comes from the crit buff intellect and the 2-set. Mathematically for throughput it is indistinguishable to a crit rate increase. So that also needs to be factored in for determining where you are.

If you have 42% buffed crit and the 2set, which adds about 6% and the crit buff for another 5% and the amp trinket at 8%, you are looking at 57.24% crit

Using the balance point for aegis generation: crit = (1+mastery)*(1+0.5*mastery)/(2.4+1.6*mastery)

You are going to need 52% buffed mastery at the very least otherwise you are going to be losing not only healing but also aegis. In your BIS set you will have 49+8 = 57% mastery

As you can see at these high levels of crit and mastery the two stats are exactly interchangeable in terms of just aegis. You can switch around quite a bit of mastery for crit with a minute reduction in aegis, but a large change in the + healing bonus.

As I said you have to be quite careful about stacking crit. You can just sacrifice a non trivial amount of + healing for absolutely no benefit other than more DPS at the level of 0.05 to 0.1% of total DPS.

For example if you are at 42% crit and 57% mastery and you choose to go to 47% crit and 49% mastery. On the face of it, it looks like you are trading 4% healing for 2.8% aegis, but in fact its not, because the 2 set adds 5-10% more crit depending on the spell.

With 5% more crit you are trading 4% healing for 1.7% more aegis aegis, with 10% more crit, you are trading 4% healing for 0.7% more aegis. If you add the amp trinket its even more slanted.

IMHO your BIS has too much crit.

I'm not sure you are correct about the Amp trinket in regards to crit.
The reason more and more crit rating becomes worth less and less compared to mastery, is that it's value declines (while boosting mastery's value through higher throughput) compared to the previous point, correct?
Well, the amp trinket does not add any rating, which means that it should not cause the value to decline. For instance:

Going from 10% to 11% crit over 100 casts, would cause a 10% increase in critical hits.
However, going from 11% crit to 12% crit over 100 casts, would only cause a 9.16% increase in critical hits (and so on and so forth, I chose 10%/11% for easy numbers to work with).
No matter at which point you are, though, the amp trinket will always increase your critical hit output by 9%. There is no diminishing at work here. If you crit 10 of your spells, their healing will be increased by 9% each. If you crit 11 of your spells, they will be increased by 9% each.

That it adds to crits value the same as if it increased your critical strike rating by 9% is correct, but the fact that it does not actually interact with the critical rating in any way, but the outcome of the critical rating, means that all it does is boost the value of crit - not diminish it in comparison to mastery. In fact, it should make crit worth more than it is without the trinket, for obvious reasons, which should push the ratio of when you'd want more mastery compared to crit.

I'm pretty sure that the ratio of mastery to crit in the BiS set is just fine.

Only socket bonuses I personally avoid is spirit (boots/ring) and haste, personally. But yea, gear is a big part of it, I think. Looked you up and you're still sporting 6 pieces of ToT gear, and just one heroic item. (Also, 200 spirit on chest? Are you sure that's better than the 80 spirit/int ?).

I am pretty happy with 200 spirit compared with 80int and 80 spi, since it is useful stats for my holy set. I don't see the point of running minimal spirit. I am not quite sure if it is really a gain in HPS to go to 6k spirit. I haven't had the time to really check the calculations, but I am reasonably certain the difference is tiny and extra spirit gives you flexibility. I don't get innervates and I don't have mana tide either so running 6k means PWS only for rapture, level90, spirit shell and the rest atonement only. This is not a playstyle I am happy with, especially since the main benefit of running minimal spirit is DPS. I doubt HPS will differ appreciably (whether it goes up or down).

The difference comes in coverage, something you've been arguing alot for as far as I recall. The more crit you have, the more consistently you will cover people with the absorbs. They will be slightly smaller, yes, but they will be "less" random the more crit you have. If the difference is covering 2 more targets with absorbs that are slightly weaker, or adding more absorbtion/natural healing to 6 targets, with almost zero difference in actual output, I'd pick giving 8 people smaller shields in the current state of the game. It's the same reason you like holy's mastery so much - the more you can cover, the better (especially with the uncapped lvl 90 talents, who, as you said, already tend to overheal ALOT. Adding more crit = more shields that are less likely to overheal. Adding more mastery = More healing and bigger shields on something that already overheals).

Fair enough more coverage is an important factor, but extra crit does not increase coverage linearly. Also the extra aegis coverage comes at a cost of universally reduced healing. I would personally rather have 6% healing on the whole raid, then aegis on an extra person on average.

I'm not sure you are correct about the Amp trinket in regards to crit.
The reason more and more crit rating becomes worth less and less compared to mastery, is that it's value declines (while boosting mastery's value through higher throughput) compared to the previous point, correct?
Well, the amp trinket does not add any rating, which means that it should not cause the value to decline. For instance:

The trinket is equivalent to increased rating the more crit you have, since its a % point. The question is how it interacts with mastery and how it fits in the healing equation. Let me explain it mathematically.

The healing equation is (1+0.5*mastery)*(1+crit*(1+mastery)). Now since crits are 8% larger and the crit modifier is 1.08, the equation becomes

(1+0.5*mastery)*(1+1.08*crit*(1+mastery)).

You can rearrange this equation like this (1+0.5*mastery)*(1+(crit+0.08*crit)*(1+mastery)) = (1+0.5*mastery)*(1+crit'*(1+mastery)), where crit' = crit+0.08*crit

thus the behaviour of the trinket is indistinguishable mathematically from changing your crit rate to a new crit rate, which I denote as crit'. This is simply your current crit rate increased by an additional 8%. This interacts exactly with mastery exactly as additional crit rating does and it devalues extra crit in exactly the same way, even if it does not quite correctly predict the proportion of your heals that is an absorb and the probabilty of getting an aegis on someone.

You could also model this differently. You can add a factor into mastery that scales with crit and just mould the formula so that it gives the correct result. That correctly predict the heal/absorb ratio and the rate of aegis formation, but unfortunately it does not have the correct scaling. Adding a crit scaling factor in mastery then alters the balance point calcluations (which rely on equalizing the partial derivative with crit rating with the partial derivative with mastery rating). In fact when you do the maths you find that it naturally reverts to the balance point predicted with modelling the buff as a crit increase.

Basically the amp trinket interacts with crit and mastery just like increased crit rating does, but because the amp trinket boosts crit much more than it boosts mastery, you end up further away from the balance point.

No matter at which point you are, though, the amp trinket will always increase your critical hit output by 9%. There is no diminishing at work here. If you crit 10 of your spells, their healing will be increased by 9% each. If you crit 11 of your spells, they will be increased by 9% each.

That it adds to crits value the same as if it increased your critical strike rating by 9% is correct, but the fact that it does not actually interact with the critical rating in any way, but the outcome of the critical rating, means that all it does is boost the value of crit - not diminish it in comparison to mastery. In fact, it should make crit worth more than it is without the trinket, for obvious reasons, which should push the ratio of when you'd want more mastery compared to crit.

I'm pretty sure that the ratio of mastery to crit in the BiS set is just fine.

No diminishing returns from the trinket and the trinket does not devalue extra crit, since that extra crit also adds to the scaling, but it does move the crit/mastery balance points, because it boosts crit more than it boosts mastery (it applies to your entire crit rate)

Bumping this for slightly different issue - how do you heal final stacks before 30? I didn't think it would be a problem, but it actually is, in an entirely different way than I expected - if healers keep going all out till the end, we actually survive until 31, which is painful. If we don't, like holding back with DS after 25+, there's some random deaths. Also, no Resto Shaman for SLT, that would trivialize things, but yeah.

I was actually considering going Holy specifically for that reason - no 150k+ shields in that moment should mean people don't stay over 50%, plus having three smart heals (admitedly, no Twist of Fate would probably suck) to help out. On the other hand, I guess just using Penance/HF from all the priests at the end would accomplish roughly the same.

Also, it's not really a case of having "too much healing", since usually transition does happen at 28, but there were few annoying cases.

Bumping this for slightly different issue - how do you heal final stacks before 30? I didn't think it would be a problem, but it actually is, in an entirely different way than I expected - if healers keep going all out till the end, we actually survive until 31, which is painful. If we don't, like holding back with DS after 25+, there's some random deaths. Also, no Resto Shaman for SLT, that would trivialize things, but yeah.

I was actually considering going Holy specifically for that reason - no 150k+ shields in that moment should mean people don't stay over 50%, plus having three smart heals (admitedly, no Twist of Fate would probably suck) to help out. On the other hand, I guess just using Penance/HF from all the priests at the end would accomplish roughly the same.

Also, it's not really a case of having "too much healing", since usually transition does happen at 28, but there were few annoying cases.

Play it safe, stack at 25 and stop using cooldowns. Passive healing and whatever healers can squeeze out of AOE heals should ensure no one actually dies, while letting the entire raid dip below 50% before 31th screech.

We killed this boss yesterday, and with this gear level there is no reason to push accelerations stacks. We managed to kill the boss before fire phase (during blue kiting phase), and we only went to 21 stacks of acceleration at the start, then 7 on green and 12 on blue. As long as you manage to optimise your dps during kiting phase, there shouldn't be needed to push for more risky stacks.

The reasoning for extending the phases is to allow for raid cooldowns to come back up for next phase 1. For 25man such low stacks would be very tight unless you're using ~6 heals and have insanely high dps.